Transcript


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I'm always amazed that higher education is such a low profile issue in political campaigns.
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I think there would be a lot that parents could do if they mobilized
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politically to challenge what's happening with the price of college
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--to challenge decisions that are being made at the federal and state level about funding higher education.
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When parents look at the rise in cost of college tuition, they don't typically stop and think,
0:36
"well, where did the money used to come from?" It used to come from the states--it doesn't really any more.
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I think that the student loan industry
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is almost criminal the way it's allowed to do business.
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These are loans that banks get to make to people that can't be defaulted on.
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And, so, there's no incentive for them to be careful about who they lend money to
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and how much they lend money to, because they'll always get their money back.
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I also don't think parents understand that the demographics of the undergraduate population has changed so much
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that the active student is now 26 years old--that the average undergraduate is 26 years old--
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that the average undergraduate works an average 30 hours per week
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and our students really are not so much students who have part time jobs--they're workers who study.
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And that means that they're going to college over a long stretch of time
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often not able to afford to do it full time.
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The model that most parents with high school age kids have in mind
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when they think about college, is the one that applied to them.
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So, it's actually very nostalgic by now, because the conditions of college
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and the typical kind of students who attend college have changed so drastically.
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The one thing I've noticed about changes in the culture of high school
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has been the boom in college preparation industry and college counselors.
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Companies like IvyWise, which virtually guarantee that their customers will be eligible or be accepted by Ivy league universities,
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they're enormously successful. They're also incredibly expensive.
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I mean, IvyWise has a Junior/Senior platinum package, which I think costs about twenty thousand dollars.
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For that amount of money, your kid is a virtual lock to be able to go to an Ivy league school,
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but at a price that's more than two years worth of tuition at Ohio State.
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I think the college prep industry is really something that's driving a wedge between the kinds of students to go to college.
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